Belarusian (endonym: беларуская мова, romanized: bielaruskaja mova, pronounced [bʲɛɫaˈruskaja ˈmɔva]) is an East Slavic language.

It was developed from the initial form set down by Branislaw Tarashkyevich (first printed in Vilnius, 1918), and it is mainly based on the Belarusian folk dialects of Minsk-Vilnius region.

The most significant instance of this is found in the representation of vowel reduction, and in particular akanje, the merger of unstressed /a/ and /o/, which exists in both Russian and Belarusian.

The end of the 18th century (the times of the Divisions of Commonwealth) is the usual conventional borderline between the Ruthenian and Modern Belarusian stages of development.

By the end of the 18th century, (Old) Belarusian was still common among the minor nobility in the eastern part, in the territory of present-day Belarus, of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (hereafter GDL).

[35] In 1846, ethnographer Pavel Shpilevskiy prepared a Belarusian grammar (using the Cyrillic alphabet) on the basis of the folk dialects of the Minsk region.

The Belarusian literary tradition began to re-form, based on the folk language, initiated by the works of Vintsent Dunin-Martsinkyevich.

So a large amount of propaganda appeared, targeted at the peasantry and written in Belarusian;[37] notably, the anti-Russian, anti-Tsarist, anti-Eastern Orthodox "Manifesto" and the first newspaper Mužyckaja prauda (Peasants' Truth) (1862–1863) by Konstanty Kalinowski, and anti-Polish, anti-Revolutionary, pro-Orthodox booklets and poems (1862).

In the editorial introduction to the dictionary, it is noted that: The Belarusian local tongue, which dominates a vast area from the Nioman and the Narew to the Upper Volga and from the Western Dvina to the Prypiac and the Ipuc and which is spoken by inhabitants of the North-Western and certain adjacent provinces, or those lands that were in the past settled by the Kryvic tribe, has long attracted the attention of our philologists because of those precious remains of the ancient Ruthenian language that survived in that tongue.

The unprecedented surge of national feeling in the 20th century, especially among the workers and peasants, particularly after the events of 1905,[41] gave momentum to the intensive development of Belarusian literature and press (See also: Nasha Niva, Yanka Kupala, Yakub Kolas).

Then Russian academician Shakhmatov, chair of the Russian language and literature department of St. Petersburg University, approached the board of the Belarusian newspaper Nasha Niva with a proposal that a Belarusian linguist be trained under his supervision in order to be able to create documentation of the grammar.

However, Bahdanovič's poor health (tuberculosis) precluded his living in the climate of St. Petersburg, so Branislaw Tarashkyevich, a fresh graduate of the Vilnya Liceum No.

By the summer of 1918, it became obvious that there were insurmountable problems with the printing of Tarashkyevich's grammar in Petrograd: a lack of paper, type and qualified personnel.

A decree of 15 July 1924 confirmed that the Belarusian, Russian, Yiddish and Polish languages had equal status in Soviet Belarus.

Notably, the use of the Ь (soft sign) before the combinations "consonant+iotated vowel" ("softened consonants"), which had been previously denounced as highly redundant (e.g., in the proceedings of the Belarusian Academic Conference (1926)), was cancelled.

However, the 5th edition (1929) (reprinted verbatim in Belarus in 1991 and often referred to) was the version diverging from the previously published one, which Tarashkyevich had prepared disregarding the Belarusian Academic Conference (1926) resolutions.

(Тарашкевіч 1991, Foreword) In 1929–30, the Communist authorities of Soviet Belarus made a series of drastic crackdowns against the supposed "national-democratic counter-revolution" (informally "nats-dems" (Belarusian: нац-дэмы)).

Effectively, entire generations of Socialist Belarusian national activists in the first quarter of the 20th century were wiped out of political, scientific and social existence.

The book published under his editorship, Science in Service of Nats-Dems' Counter-Revolution (1931), represented the new spirit of political life in Soviet Belarus.

There had been some post-facto speculations, too, that the 1930 project of the reform (as prepared by people who were no longer seen as politically "clean"), had been given for the "purification" to the "nats-dems" competition in the Academy of Sciences, which would explain the "block" nature of the differences between the 1930 and 1933 versions.

Jan Stankievič, in his critique of the reform talked about 25 changes, with one of them being strictly orthographical and 24 relating to both orthography and grammar.

[Stank 1936] Many of the changes in the orthography proper ("stronger principle of AH-ing," "no redundant soft sign," "uniform nye and byez") were, in fact, simply implementations of earlier proposals made by people who had subsequently suffered political suppression (e.g., Yazep Lyosik, Lastowski, Nyekrashevich, 1930 project).

[49] That was the source of concern for the nationally minded and caused, for example, the series of publications by Barys Sachanka in 1957–61 and the text named "Letter to a Russian Friend" by Alyaksyey Kawka (1979).

The BSSR Communist party leader Kirill Mazurov made some tentative moves to strengthen the role of Belarusian language in the second half of the 1950s.

[50] After the beginning of Perestroika and the relaxing of political control in the late 1980s, a new campaign in support of the Belarusian language was mounted in BSSR, expressed in the "Letter of 58" and other publications, producing a certain level of popular support and resulting in the BSSR Supreme Soviet ratifying the "Law on Languages" ("Закон аб мовах"; 26 January 1990) requiring the strengthening of the role of Belarusian in state and civic structures.

[52] However, the implementation of the 1992–94 "Law on Languages" took place in such a way that it provoked public protests and was dubbed "Landslide Belarusization" and "undemocratic" by those opposing it in 1992–94.

State support for Belarusian language and culture in general has dwindled since then, and Russian is dominant in everyday life in today's Belarus.

[56] Adam Maldzis considers that one of typological similarities is the official bilinguism both in Belarus and Ireland, and the low real status of the mother-tongue.

Taraškievica also features a more phonetic spelling system, particularly using a separate letter for the [ɡ] sound, which is argued to be an allophone of [ɣ] rather than a phoneme.

The romanization of the text into Latin alphabet:Usie ludzi naradžajucca svabodnymi i rownymi w svajoj hodnasci i pravach.